If you search Reddit or Twitter for “SaaS ideas,” you will find thousands of discussions and tweets. There is no shortage of people looking for viable product ideas that they can build.
Maybe, you’ve even found yourself searching through these threads looking for the perfect SaaS idea to build.
However, with so many different startup ideas out there, many aspiring SaaS founders get in their own way.
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You are stuck in an eternal state of analysis paralysis with a spreadsheet full of different project ideas but still can't find the perfect SaaS idea to build.
You waste hours each month on ProductHunt looking at different software products.
You build a SaaS app that you think is cool, but it turns out it isn’t solving a problem for anyone.
If you want to avoid any of these unfortunate outcomes, here is how to come up with SaaS ideas that have real potential.
Let’s dive in!
How to come up with endless SaaS ideas
If you want to avoid these outcomes, here are some overarching market research tactics you can use to start finding better business ideas.
The Excel Opportunity: Anytime businesses are using Excel or Google Sheets to duct tape a solution to a specific problem, there is probably an opportunity to build efficient software.
Look for market gaps in B2B SaaS marketplaces: From Salesforce and HubSpot to Heroku, BigCommerce, and Shopify, there are over 75 app marketplaces in existing SaaS platforms. While there is some platform risk to building an app for a marketplace, this can often be a great on ramp when building your first SaaS business.
Find the edge cases in the no-code ecosystem: No code / low-code tool adoption is only continuing to grow. There are already many players in this space, from Zapier and Airtable to Softr, Glide, and Bubble. If you are familiar with the space, you can likely spot the edges where there is a need for more tooling.
13 SaaS-specific ideas to build right now
While we’ve outlined a handful of general market research approaches, here are six specific SaaS startup ideas that Rob sees based on specific problems he has experienced in his own companies or through TinySeed.
1. Podcast production management
There is an opportunity for someone who is entrenched in the podcast industry to build an all-in-one podcast management app.
For instance, as the host of three podcasts, our team is always duct-taping things together to make it work. We’ve used everything from Google Drive and Dropbox to Notion and Trello. Now, we’ve built a custom workflow app inside Airtable. However, we still have to use Dropbox for hosting all of the files and a Trello board for syncing all of the listener questions.
2. Applicant tracker for startup accelerators and universities
Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are common for hiring and recruiting at large organizations. However, there isn’t a dedicated ATS that works well for edge cases like startup accelerators or even universities.
For instance, at TinySeed, we’ve tried out two different systems because we get several hundred applicants whenever we do a batch opening. We want to be able to rate each applicant, view/log/store conversations, make offers, run reports, etc. The current options on the market have a poor UX and don’t have many of the features that an accelerator needs, like custom filtering and reporting. While this is a niche market, there is the potential to charge a higher price point given the specific requirements.
3. Pricing pages in a box
If you’ve spent any time in the WordPress space, you know there are a handful of plugins that make it easy to spin up pricing pages. This isn’t the case for SaaS companies.
If you are a software engineer looking for your first SaaS idea, this could be a decent micro-SaaS to save founders a lot of time making pricing updates as well as finding additional revenue opportunities. Think if you can spin up these changes in minutes, this means more founders will be willing to run split tests.
One of the reasons why this is a micro-SaaS business idea is because there is more platform risk. Your entire business model could disappear if Stripe builds a feature that does this well "for free."
4. Zapier for X
Zapier is like the duct tape of the Internet for startups and tech companies with thousands of integrations. However, there are many smaller niches that aren’t served well by Zapier, like medical, legal, construction, or interior design.
It wouldn’t make sense for Zapier to build and cater to these niches. However, if you have expertise in a niche that is underserved by Zapier, there is a real opportunity to connect all of the tools in a streamlined way and turn that into a 6 or 7-figure business.
5. An Intercom or Drift competitor for SMBs
Spend 30 minutes on Reddit, Capterra, or Twitter, and you will find dozens of complaints from frustrated small business owners and startup founders about how expensive Intercom and Drift are. These tools have gone upmarket and are mainly focused on selling to enterprise companies.
There is a void in the market for a tool that caters to SMBs. This doesn’t have to be a $ 10-per-month chat tool either. Instead, it could be a few hundred dollars per month.
While there is a real opportunity to grow a sizable business, we wouldn’t recommend tackling this if this is your first SaaS business. This is a complex build in a very competitive market.
6. Investor update and reporting dashboard
This falls into the Excel opportunity that we outlined above. For instance, there are a lot of venture funds and accelerators that raise a lot of money from investors to invest in various startups.
They have to do two things:
Get monthly updates from these startups they invest in
Provide consolidated updates about fund performance and the companies in these batches
Currently, most are cobbling together a process through forms, emails, and a lot of spreadsheets and dashboards. Building an app that can streamline this update and reporting process can save a ton of time.
7. Create a competitor to Plaid or Yodlee.
These services, designed to connect fintech companies with banks, often fall short in terms of functionality and user experience.
They are meant to connect to banks around the country and allow entrepreneurs who build fintech to plug into one service instead of having to do 100 integrations with all the banks around the nation and around the world.
The problem we've noticed with these two offerings is that, according to feedback from users, they can be quite frustrating and simply don't work as intended. There are persistent issues with dirty data, bugs, and a range of other functionality problems. Solving such a complex problem would require a lot of commitment, including raising funding, but it is an idea that, if played out correctly, could potentially be huge.
8. Build a net worth tracker
The main goal behind this idea is that you plug these trackers into all your financial accounts, and they help you see how you are diversified or not across different portfolio drivers. So it might tell you, you are overweight in U.S. stocks, or you're overweight in small-cap U.S. stocks or large-cap, or underweight mid-cap, you get the idea.
Currently, manual work dominates this space, making an automated net worth tracker a sought-after tool.
9. Streamline slide deck creation
Create a service that generates slides from prompts. It can generate an entire deck based on a long prompt or each individual slide based on a detailed description.
Streamlining slide deck creation is a critical aspect of delivering impactful presentations, whether it's for conferences, board meetings, investor pitches, or other professional engagements. The process of crafting engaging and visually appealing slide decks often involves significant time and effort, especially when starting from scratch.
The focus of this software should be on providing reliable functionality, whether through AI-generated images or partnerships with stock photo services. Additionally, taking into account popular search queries for two-slide decks can guide template creation and help optimize visibility. With these improvements, professionals and presenters will have access to a powerful tool that simplifies the process and elevates the quality of their presentations.
10. Simplify HACCP paperwork
Target the agricultural production sector by developing software that eases the burden of safety and HACCP plan documentation.
Right now, we have seen examples of people that are experiencing a pain point only on documentation and manual labor that costs them approximately 10 hours a week, 500 hours a year.
Let’s do some quick math. If they make $100,000 a year, that's 25,000 in salary alone. If they make half that, it's still 12,500. Software like this could sell for an interesting price point if this is a common pain point in agricultural processing facilities.
Next steps: try to have some conversations. Do other people have this pain point or not?
11. Build a mobile app for hiring temporary workers
Address the pain points faced by staffing agencies and construction companies by creating a mobile app that serves as a Linkedin-like platform for temporary workers. Streamline the process of finding and hiring temp workers in the construction industry, offering a game-changing solution to alleviate the current challenges.
If you want to go big or even if you just want to get wealthy, this is an intriguing idea. And we would recommend starting by either building an audience on one side or figuring out where these folks hang around. If they're looking on Craigslist, if they're looking on Indeed, then we would probably go to those sites to try to bring folks into the ecosystem. Definitely, more validation is needed before we would recommend pursuing this though.
12. Develop an all-in-one Amazon Seller utility
For this idea, you would need to cater to the needs of Amazon sellers by offering a comprehensive tool that combines functionalities like product research, competitive keyword analysis, sales tax management, and other essential business tools. By providing an all-encompassing solution, you can simplify the selling experience for Amazon sellers and differentiate yourself from existing fragmented offerings.
It's what Salesforce has done. It's what HubSpot has done. They want a bundle. It's not going to be a bunch of the best-in-class tools. That's the way bundles work. Each individual piece is not that great, but it can work.
13. Implement Elastic search for tax accountants
You can address the specific needs of tax preparers and multinational corporations by developing an application that enhances the sorting, classification, and filtering of fixed assets.
By leveraging AI and Elastic search, you can significantly reduce manual calculation time and provide more tailored reporting capabilities to meet state requirements.
And if this idea works for accountants, do attorneys then need it? Do other folks in professional service roles need a tool like this? Obviously, the market could be tremendously large, and if it saves a lot of person-hours, even just for accountants, you should be able to charge a pretty penny for it.
Validate your idea before you start building
Whether you use the market research tactics we outlined above, or you were inspired by one of the specific business startup ideas, it is critical that you validate your SaaS idea before you spend months building out the thing.
The best form of validation to turn an idea to reality is pre-sales. If someone is willing to give you money before they even can use the thing, that's a great sign that you are onto something. However, this isn’t always the most realistic. Some additional tactics to validate your idea are:
Launch an initial MVP via a productized service. This is both idea validation and a source of monthly revenue. You can use the money from the service business for application development.
Collect email sign-ups on a dedicated landing page
Write blog posts around the problem that your SaaS app will solve.
Hang out where your potential customers are and see if this is a real problem that they are willing to spend money on.
Related Reading: An unconventional approach to a SaaS product launch
By taking the time upfront to prevalidate any SaaS application ideas, you will increase the likelihood of building something that people actually want to use and pay for.
